1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to providing information, such as workload statistics and resource utilization, about calls within a communications network and, more particularly, to providing real-time information pertaining to the operation of call centers.
2. Description of Related Art
A typical call center houses a number of agents who handle incoming telephone calls or place outbound telephone calls. Call centers are often used for telemarketing, reservation centers, sales calls, customer services, technical support, and the like.
Each agent in a call center has an associated station that typically includes a personal computer or workstation, a phone keypad and a headset. The workstation is most often used to access information in a database pertaining to the calls being handled by the agent. For example, the workstation may provide views of account information or contact information pertaining to a customer whom the agent engages on the phone. Where a call center is used for accepting orders for goods or services, the workstation may provide information on the availability and the pricing of a product. The agent may use the information retrieved from the database to help a caller. The agent may accept information from a caller for entry into the database.
In addition to a database shared by the agents, a call center typically comprises an automatic call distributor (ACD) for channeling or routing calls to available agents.
In large call centers, the agents are often organized into groups and have associated supervisors who are responsible for managing and overseeing the agents. To assist in effective management of call center resources, supervisors are usually provided with real-time statistics pertaining to the operation of the call center, such as the number of calls on hold, wait times being experienced, and the number of abandoned calls. These statistics may be obtained indirectly from the ACD. Other useful statistics, such as the number of agents on duty, may be obtained from the network or agent workstations, wherein the agents “check-in” whenever they are on duty.
In recent times, communications service providers have been able to offer large business enterprises the ability to share call center operations among multiple geographically dispersed call centers. In particular, network-resident call handling technologies, such as intelligent network services platforms, have been developed for performing some of the handling and queuing of each inbound call within the communications network, that is, before the call is forwarded to an ACD at a particular call center. This is advantageous for allowing load balancing among multiple call centers and enabling agent-based or skills-based routing across multiple call centers. Furthermore, the initial automatic voice response activity that greets the caller and the parking of calls becomes the responsibility of the communications network provider, relieving a business enterprise of many of the costs and other burdens associated with running a complete, self-contained call handling system.